1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control apparatus, a printing control method, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Printing control apparatuses having an interrupt function are known from the conventional technology. In this type of printing control apparatus, when an interrupting job is received, regardless of the sort of document of the interrupted job that is being printed, printing is temporarily stopped, and a change is made to printing of the document of the interrupting job. A problem has been pointed out that as a result, when the number of output pages of the interrupting job is very high, the user who is printing the interrupted job is made to wait, with printing of the interrupted job not ever finishing, for as long as it takes to print the interrupting job.
As technology addressing this problem, there has been proposed technology in which control is performed such that when an interrupt instruction has been received from a host computer during printing processing, both documents are alternately output based on a fixed ratio (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-123377). This technology eliminates a circumstance in which an interrupt document having many pages that has been designated for interrupt printing is given priority, and printing output of a preceding document having few pages is delayed.
On the other hand, as an example of a printing system in which the added value of a printed item is increased, there is a printing system in which gloss processing is performed that gives a glossy finish to a printing face. As an example of a method for performing gloss processing, there is a method in which a glosser is used, the glosser being one type of offline finisher. The glosser, by applying pressure and heat to a printed item, temporarily melts the surface of toner fixed to the paper face, and by afterward cooling that surface while applying pressure on a belt, smoothes the surface portion of the toner like a mirrored face, and thus is able to give a gloss effect to the paper face. Incidentally, when printing is performed in which a gloss effect is given by using a glosser, in the printing apparatus, it is necessary that toner is weakly fixed to the printed item applied to the glosser (below, this processing is referred to as glosser pre-processing). The reason for this is that toner is made more easily melted when the gloss effect is applied in the glosser. In order to perform glosser pre-processing, it is necessary to reduce the toner fixing temperature in the printing apparatus by about 40 degrees from the ordinary fixing temperature (about 200 degrees), and this ordinarily requires a time period of about 7 to 10 minutes.
However, with a printing control apparatus capable of interrupt printing control, for example, during execution of a job, when performing interrupt printing of a job that requires a different temperature than the job currently being executed, it takes time to change the temperature of a fixing unit. For example, when, during execution of a job in which toner is fixed at 200 degrees, interrupt printing of a job is performed in order to perform glosser pre-processing in which toner is fixed at 160 degrees, a user is required to wait for the temperature of the fixing unit to decrease.
Moreover, after execution of the interrupting job in which glosser pre-processing is performed, the job that was stopped due to the interruption is restarted, and in this case, it is necessary for the temperature of the fixing unit to be increased from 160 degrees to 200 degrees.